Digital electronics represent signals by discrete bands of analog levels, rather than by a continuous range. All levels within a band represent the same signal state. Relatively small changes to the analog signal levels due to manufacturing tolerance, signal attenuation or parasitic noise do not leave the discrete envelope, and as result are ignored by signal state sensing circuitry.In most cases the number of these states is two, and they are represented by two voltage bands: one near zero volts and a higher level near the supply voltage, corresponding to the "false" ("0") and "true" ("1") values of the boolean domain respectively.

Digital techniques are useful because it is easier to get an electronic device to switch into one of a number of known states than toaccurately reproduce a continuous range of values.

Digital electronic circuits are usually made from large assemblies of logic gates, simple electronic representations of Boolean logic functions.[1]

[edit]Disadvantages

In some cases, digital circuits use more energy than analog circuits to accomplish the same tasks, thus producing more heat. In portable or battery-powered systems this canlimit use of digital systems.

For example, battery-powered cellular telephones often use a low-power analog front-end to amplify and tune in the radio signals from the base station. However, a base station has grid power and can use power-hungry, but very flexible software radios. Such base stations can be easily reprogrammed to process the signals used in new cellular standards.

Digitalcircuits are sometimes more expensive, especially in small quantities.

Most useful digital systems must translate from continuous analog signals to discrete digital signals. This causes quantization errors. Quantization error can be reduced if the system stores enough digital data to represent the signal to the desired degree of fidelity. The Nyquist-Shannon sampling theorem provides an importantguideline as to how much digital data is needed to accurately portray a given analog signal.

In some systems, if a single piece of digital data is lost or misinterpreted, the meaning of large blocks of related data can completely change. Because of the cliff effect, it can be difficult for users to tell if a particular system is right on the edge of failure, or if it can tolerate much more noisebefore failing.

Digital fragility can be reduced by designing a digital system for robustness. For example, a parity bit or other error management method can be inserted into the signal path. These schemes help the system detect errors, and then either correct the errors, or at least ask for a new copy of the data. In a state-machine, the state transition logic can be designed to catch unusedstates and trigger a reset sequence or other error recovery routine.

Digital memory and transmission systems can use techniques such as error detection and correction to use additional data to correct any errors in transmission and storage.

On the other hand, some techniques used in digital systems make those systems more vulnerable to single-bit errors. These techniques are acceptable when theunderlying bits are reliable enough that such errors are highly unlikely. A single-bit error in audio data stored directly as linear pulse code modulation (such as on a CD-ROM) causes, at worst, a single click. Instead, many people use audio compression to save storage space and download time, even though a single-bit error may corrupt the entire song.

[edit]Analog issues in digital circuitsDigital circuits are made from analog components. The design must assure that the analog nature of the components doesn't dominate the desired digital behavior. Digital systems must manage noise and timing margins, parasitic inductances and capacitances, and filter power connections.

Bad designs have intermittent problems such as "glitches", vanishingly-fast pulses that may trigger some...